by Peter Rees
On leave in London in July 1917, E.A. Box, secretary to High Commissioner Andrew Fisher, suggested that Bean could put the case for removing I Anzac Corps from General Hubert Gough’s command. Keith Murdoch was also involved in the discussion, and Bean realised that he and Box must have already discussed this issue, as the strongly patriotic Murdoch had wanted Gough removed from command of the Australians ever since Bullecourt. Bean noted that when Murdoch heard the Australians were going under Gough, he had said, ‘I suppose they’ll be murdered again.’
Bean told Box that he was not prepared to lobby Lloyd George to sack Gough because he had no idea if there was anybody better to replace him. Box suggested General Edmund Allenby, whom Haig had just removed from command of the Third Army. Bean knew that Birdwood and White thought Allenby ‘vile’. ‘But I told Box I wouldn’t mind telling Lloyd George exactly what happened at Fromelles and Bullecourt as far as I knew it, and that I would certainly ask for the Australian divisions to be brought together. Everyone wants it.’
Both Murdoch and Box insisted to Bean that Lloyd George would do nothing unless he saw that it would help him secure victory. He would listen to anything that would help win the war, ‘But merely that a thing was right, or that it was due to Australia to treat her as a nation—this would have no appeal to him.’ During the discussion Bean was taken aback to also hear Murdoch and Box say of Prime Minister Billy Hughes that the best way to make him act was to appeal to his own interests, which he had constantly in mind. Bean thought it was ‘perfectly nauseating to have to deal with politicians after dealing with soldiers’ who generally acted from patriotic motives. The politician, with rare exceptions, seemed to think of himself all the time; and in the case of Hughes, didn’t seem to try to hide it from his friends.
It is awful to think of Australia’s part in the war being directed according as Hughes thinks it benefits him—and that the people and soldiers only get their will through the fact that Hughes thinks it is in his interest to do what they want.
I can’t help thinking this view of Lloyd George and Hughes is too cynical—that both of them believe, at any rate, that their motive is the good of their country. Box argues that they have come to believe that it is good for the country to have them in power and so their patriotic duty is to devote all their thought and energy to supporting themselves. It is like touching pitch, getting into the dirty business.
The three decided that Lloyd George should be asked three things: to bring the AIF divisions together; get their corps staffed by Australians; and ask for Australia to have direct representation in London so that Birdwood could have direct communications with the War Council instead of always having to go through GHQ. They decided that the best strategy would be to cable Hughes seeking his support on these issues. Bean would then approach Lloyd George.
Hughes had come to rely heavily on Murdoch to represent him in London, not only on the course of the war but also on how the Australian troops were faring. On 12 July Murdoch cabled Hughes urging that he immediately consider consolidating the five Australian divisions into an Australian Corps. Murdoch assured Hughes that through all divisions there was a ‘very strong desire’ consistently voiced for the divisions to be brought together. The cable emphasised the ardent nationalism among Australian officers and men, who strenuously disliked GHQ’s policy regarding them ‘as merely British troops,’ refused to recognise Australian nationality, and even omitted them from communiqués.
Over the next couple of days Bean worked on his own letter to Lloyd George—the second part of the strategy. In it, Bean told Lloyd George there was a strong and universal feeling in the AIF, from generals to privates, for all the Australian divisions to be brought together in France. There was an intense ‘family feeling’ among these troops, which meant they relied on those in the family far more than on others, and were more anxious to acquit themselves in each other’s eyes than in any others.
You in England have an understanding of the strength of Australian nationalism as the one great motive working in our people, but I do not think that GHQ has the slightest comprehension of it, or of its value for getting the best out of our troops or our people. We know it is the strongest motive they have, by far—the obvious and only medium through which to deal with them. I think GHQ is actually hostile to it, and regards it if anything as a drawback and a nuisance that any such motive should exist; a sort of treachery to the old idea of the Empire, which I suppose naturally lingers amongst regular soldiers. The idea of GHQ I believe is that all units should be completely interchangeable. However desirable it may be it is not the fact; and it takes no account of the immense value attaching to this national pride.
Bean listed the failure of inadequate British units at both Fromelles and Bullecourt, when fighting alongside the Australians, as another reason why the AIF wanted to fight alongside their own units. He asked for two things. The first was to bring the Australian troops all together in France. The second was a personal request: to a large extent, he said, he was responsible for Australia’s national records, but he sometimes found that the Australian desire for a complete record was thwarted by incidental rules and machinery that applied to British officials who might not have the same goals. He had examples in mind:
My Government and the nation has again and again missed getting a quite invaluable set of photographs of such fights as Bullecourt and Messines because there is a rule against my carrying a camera unless I have a commission—although there is no suggestion that the photographs should be used for any except national records. It is against my government’s policy, rightly, for me to have a commission; and those records, which might have existed in your national galleries and ours are lost, because I sometimes by chance happened to be the only recorder present.
If he ran into obstacles with the British military hierarchy in his quest to build up an adequate set of national records, he asked, ‘may I write to you, who have a grasp of what our national motive means, and a word from whom can no doubt smooth out the difficulty in less time than it takes to say it?’
Bean had clearly moved beyond the role of official war correspondent. In planning his approach to Lloyd George he knew he had White’s backing, and in London he had won the support of the High Commissioner’s official secretary. After sending the letter, Bean spoke with Lloyd George’s secretary, who promised an interview with the Prime Minister. It did not go ahead. While he waited, however, Bean visited the writer and poet John Masefield, whose book Gallipoli had described what the common soldier had endured in that dreadful campaign and become a bestseller. Like Bean, Masefield was fascinated by the Anzacs and their deeds. ‘Masefield has conceived an immense belief in the Australians,’ Bean wrote. ‘He thinks these magnificent men ought to be sent back to Australia at once as it is a tragedy to have the young race killed off—he would let the old race die rather.’ They were of like mind about what they wanted to emerge from the war:
Masefield thinks, like me, that the best thing that the world can get out of the war—especially England—is a revolution. Masefield and Mrs Masefield are both at heart, and profess to be, revolutionaries. I think it is a fad of the Asquith clique, perhaps, to pretend to be revolutionary—the last crowd in the world, really, who desire anyone to rule except ‘us’—the intellectual snobs of English political society. But I think Masefield and Mrs Masefield are thoroughly sincere in their wish for the poor of England and the suppressed to come by their own.
These musings were not idle. While he was no revolutionary, Bean’s mind was fertile ground for such thoughts as he looked at how Australia would emerge from the war. His views were forming about what the war meant for a young nation, the sacrifice of men that he had witnessed, and what returning troops were owed when the war finally ended.
Yet again, though, Bean had to deal with the matter of the official photographer. Herbert Baldwin had spent the previous eight months taking still photographs and cine film under Bean’s direction, completing 540 glass-plate nega
tives that would come to be regarded as among the best images of the Western Front. But his health had broken down, and Bean needed to replace him.
Bean had a lengthy meeting with Haig’s chief intelligence officer, Brigadier General John Charteris, during which he raised the issue of acquiring photographic records for Australia. Brash and loudmouthed, Charteris was despised even by his own men. His efforts to fob Bean off showed how Bean’s aims as a correspondent and historian conflicted with those of the British military. Bean told Charteris that since they had last met twelve months earlier the Australians had been through Pozières, Bapaume, Bullecourt and Messines, yet opportunities for important historical photographs had been lost because of the British ban against his taking photographs.
Charteris rejected the argument, telling Bean he did not know what photographs the British had. He continued: ‘I tell you that we have all that we want to have; we have the photographed panorama taken from our front line—and as a military student I tell you that that is all I desire to have; that helps me far more than any photograph that you could take.’ Bean responded that these photos covered only a small amount of what historians would want, such as the famous trenches in which fighting had taken place and various views of Mouquet Farm—all the key battle sites captured before they were destroyed. Bean noted that Charteris changed his ground at once: ‘These photos,’ he said pointing to one of his panoramas, ‘help us to win the war, and that is all I want to do—nothing matters except that.’ He argued that his photos were enough, adding: ‘You know, no history that you can write can be of any importance except purely locally. It cannot be written from here—the real history will be written by somebody right away from the war.’ Bean said that on the contrary, as far as Australia was concerned his history would be all-important. But Charteris hit back that it could only be a record of a number of incidents and events:
I replied that although I realised the difficulty I intended to try and so study the events as to correlate them just as much as any historian would. I quite realised that it was difficult to write a war from the middle of it; and I quite realised that I might never finish this war. But I hoped I would; and if I did, I felt I was in a position in which scarcely any historian of a war had ever been—that of a man who will write about a war which he has seen all through, in which he has been in every important trench, and seen almost every important event. The illustrations and incidents would be true in detail—and it was for my country not myself that I wanted these photographs. Could not their definition of the person authorised to take photos be extended to the Official Historian.
Charteris said no, but agreed to support Bean in getting a second official photographer, who would accompany him for record work. ‘At any rate, see if you cannot manage it that way,’ he said finally. Bean couldn’t help wondering if the letter to Lloyd George ‘might not have done something.’ Bean’s quiet advocacy was being listened to. And the cable from Murdoch to Hughes was also starting to draw results, with the Australian Government wiring Birdwood that it intended to fill positions on divisional and corps staffs with Australian officers.
Bean heard that the thirty-one-year-old Australian photographer Frank Hurley, who had accompanied the explorer Douglas Mawson to the Antarctic, was due to arrive in London. Hurley would do the picturesque and press work, but a second photographer would be used for the historical records. Bean saw these as two distinct areas. In this he was ahead of the British, as they had not begun to collect the historical record on film. This was ‘an irremediable loss.’
The photographer recruited for this task was a young officer from the Australian Flying Corps, Hubert Wilkins. The twenty-eight-year-old Wilkins had almost the same credentials as Hurley—but in the Arctic rather than the Antarctic. Wilkins had filmed during the 1912 Turkish–Bulgarian war, and then joined the ill-fated 1913 expedition led by Canadian Vilhjalmur Stefansson to explore the Arctic. Wilkins survived a harrowing three years with Stefansson, but seventeen other members of the expedition died. When news of the war reached him, Wilkins sailed for England. His ship was torpedoed and sank in the mid-Atlantic, but Wilkins survived in a lifeboat and was picked up the next day. In London, he met Frank Hurley for the first time. Hurley had been through his own misadventures with Shackleton, surviving two years in the Antarctic after the wreck of the Endurance.
Thus, Wilkins, a second lieutenant, and Hurley, an honorary captain, arrived at I Anzac Corps headquarters on the Western Front to work with Bean. Hurley and Wilkins became firm friends. Although very different in temperament, they shared a taste for adventure, great tolerance for physical discomfort and no lack of courage. Each was largely self-taught and highly competent in photography. They were enthusiastic about the opportunity to record the war and furthermore, they knew how to talk to Australian soldiers. They were ideal for Bean’s project. Arriving at Boulogne late on the afternoon of 21 August, they headed to Flanders. Hurley soon thought Bean was ‘an excellent fellow and not afraid to be in any of the stunts in which our fellows take part.’
Despite success in acquiring photographers, Bean was displeased when a letter from AIF headquarters arrived informing him that the Australian Press Association had asked for a correspondent at the front, and Prime Minister Hughes had agreed. Bean was concerned that this could mean working in competition with another journalist. He believed that competition was best left out of war correspondence. He was relieved to hear that the new correspondent, Gordon Gilmour, would only be visiting the front on the same basis as Keith Murdoch.
The number of Australian journalists who had been involved in covering the war to that point was just a handful—among them, Harry Gullett and Phillip Schuler, both friends of Bean. He had known Gullett from his early days on The Sydney Morning Herald, and Schuler since they palled up on the Orvieto sailing from Australia to Egypt. There were important intersections in their careers. Bean had reconnected with Gullett in pre-war London when posted there as the Herald correspondent. Besides writing for the Sydney Daily Telegraph and The Sun, Gullett had become interested in migration, believing it to be the key to Australia’s development and defence. Through this, he became closely involved in the immigration work of Australia House and, in 1914, published in London The Opportunity in Australia, an illustrated practical handbook on Australian rural life. Gullett, like Bean, believed in the value of Australian bush life and the migration of British people to populate Australia.
When, in March 1915, the British government had decided to liberalise press access to the Western Front by allowing small groups of war correspondents to visit on short-term tours, the Australian Government nominated Gullett. His role was to forward messages to the Defence Department for distribution to the Australian press. After a year in France he returned to Australia to lecture on the war, then in July 1916 enlisted in the AIF as a gunner. Gullett’s return to England early in 1917 coincided with the organisation of the AWRS, and Bean selected him to command the subsection to be set up in Egypt, leaving later in the year.
Phillip Schuler was a friend and colleague to whom Bean owed a debt. As the Melbourne Age’s correspondent, Schuler had helped out when Bean was recovering from his bullet wound at Gallipoli, keeping him up to date on the fighting as Bean lay confined to his bunk. Around this time, after dinner at Imbros with Schuler, Bazley and his own brother Jack, Bean commented wistfully in his diary that he hoped they all survived the war, as it would ‘be something to talk and think of afterwards between us all.’
In early April 1916 Schuler quit journalism and enlisted in the Army. A short time later, before he had seen the final printers’ proofs of his book on the Gallipoli campaign, Australia in Arms, Schuler was on his way to France. His motivation for enlisting remains unclear. Certainly, he refused an immediate commission and enlisted as a private, taking a job as a driver with the Australian Army Service Corps. He and Bean met up on 2 June 1917 and had ‘a little yarn’ over lunch. Schuler had told him he was going to ‘marry a little Russian countess
in Egypt after the war.’ Bean was pleased for his friend and thought this news added ‘consistency to his other good points.’
Lunch over, Schuler returned to the lines. Three weeks later, in his capacity as a driver, he was involved in fighting around Messines. During the action he was horrifically wounded, suffering gunshot wounds to the arm, face, throat and leg. He was taken to the 2nd Australian Casualty Clearing Station, at Trois Arbres, where he died and was buried. In Melbourne, those who knew his father, Frederick Schuler, editor of The Age, said he never recovered from the loss of his twenty-seven-year-old only son. The dinner on Imbros had taken on a new significance.
Moved by the death of his good friend, Bean wrote a tribute in the Australian press. He said Schuler was a ‘brilliantly handsome, bright, attractive, generous’ man whom he had come to know well on the voyage to Egypt and then at Mena camp:
He worked harder than almost any other war correspondent I ever knew. He wrote only what he saw. His letters [stories] were true, and only those who knew what oceans of false stuff have been poured on to the world in this war can appreciate what that means . . .
His power of taking in the whole situation by a survey of the movements on the hills would have made him a brilliant intelligence officer. The reports he brought back from his rambles were fuller than the official news, and truer, and his history of Anzac will always remain the classic for that period on that account. He was a boy of delicate, almost fastidious taste, fond of flowers, scrupulously neat even under conditions of discomfort, but his bravery and energy crowded his short stay at Anzac with such experience as has rarely been gained by journalists, and he held the honor of Australian journalism very high.